第40章

"Gentlemen, let us look at things as they are.Some of us have come back to our native town because we'd failed to get on elsewhere.One way or other, things had gone wrong with us...what we'd dreamed of hadn't come true.But the fact that we had failed elsewhere is no reason why we should fail here.Our very experiments in larger places, even if they were unsuccessful, ought to have helped us to make North Dormer a larger place...and you young men who are preparing even now to follow the call of ambition, and turn your back on the old homes--well, let me say this to you, that if ever you do come back to them it's worth while to come back to them for their good....And to do that, you must keep on loving them while you're away from them; and even if you come back against your will--and thinking it's all a bitter mistake of Fate or Providence--you must try to make the best of it, and to make the best of your old town; and after a while--well, ladies and gentlemen, I give you my recipe for what it's worth; after a while, I believe you'll be able to say, as I can say today: 'I'm glad I'm here.'

Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there."He stopped, and a murmur of emotion and surprise ran through the audience.It was not in the least what they had expected, but it moved them more than what they had expected would have moved them."Hear, hear!"a voice cried out in the middle of the hall.An outburst of cheers caught up the cry, and as they subsided Charity heard Mr.Miles saying to someone near him: "That was a MAN talking----" He wiped his spectacles.

Mr.Royall had stepped back from the desk, and taken his seat in the row of chairs in front of the harmonium.A dapper white-haired gentleman--a distant Hatchard--succeeded him behind the goldenrod, and began to say beautiful things about the old oaken bucket, patient white-haired mothers, and where the boys used to go nutting...and Charity began again to search for Harney....

Suddenly Mr.Royall pushed back his seat, and one of the maple branches in front of the harmonium collapsed with a crash.It uncovered the end of the first row and in one of the seats Charity saw Harney, and in the next a lady whose face was turned toward him, and almost hidden by the brim of her drooping hat.Charity did not need to see the face.She knew at a glance the slim figure, the fair hair heaped up under the hat-brim, the long pale wrinkled gloves with bracelets slipping over them.At the fall of the branch Miss Balch turned her head toward the stage, and in her pretty thin-lipped smile there lingered the reflection of something her neighbour had been whispering to her....

Someone came forward to replace the fallen branch, and Miss Balch and Harney were once more hidden.But to Charity the vision of their two faces had blotted out everything.In a flash they had shown her the bare reality of her situation.Behind the frail screen of her lover's caresses was the whole inscrutable mystery of his life: his relations with other people--with other women--his opinions, his prejudices, his principles, the net of influences and interests and ambitions in which every man's life is entangled.Of all these she knew nothing, except what he had told her of his architectural aspirations.She had always dimly guessed him to be in touch with important people, involved in complicated relations--but she felt it all to be so far beyond her understanding that the whole subject hung like a luminous mist on the farthest verge of her thoughts.In the foreground, hiding all else, there was the glow of his presence, the light and shadow of his face, the way his short-sighted eyes, at her approach, widened and deepened as if to draw her down into them; and, above all, the flush of youth and tenderness in which his words enclosed her.

Now she saw him detached from her, drawn back into the unknown, and whispering to another girl things that provoked the same smile of mischievous complicity he had so often called to her own lips.The feeling possessing her was not one of jealousy: she was too sure of his love.It was rather a terror of the unknown, of all the mysterious attractions that must even now be dragging him away from her, and of her own powerlessness to contend with them.

She had given him all she had--but what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She understood now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of thing happened.They gave all they had, but their all was not enough: it could not buy more than a few moments....

The heat had grown suffocating--she felt it descend on her in smothering waves, and the faces in the crowded hall began to dance like the pictures flashed on the screen at Nettleton.For an instant Mr.Royall's countenance detached itself from the general blur.He had resumed his place in front of the harmonium, and sat close to her, his eyes on her face; and his look seemed to pierce to the very centre of her confused sensations....A feeling of physical sickness rushed over her--and then deadly apprehension.The light of the fiery hours in the little house swept back on her in a glare of fear....

She forced herself to look away from her guardian, and became aware that the oratory of the Hatchard cousin had ceased, and that Mr.Miles was again flapping his wings.Fragments of his peroration floated through her bewildered brain...."A rich harvest of hallowed memories....A sanctified hour to which, in moments of trial, your thoughts will prayerfully return....And now, O Lord, let us humbly and fervently give thanks for this blessed day of reunion, here in the old home to which we have come back from so far.

Preserve it to us, O Lord, in times to come, in all its homely sweetness--in the kindliness and wisdom of its old people, in the courage and industry of its young men, in the piety and purity of this group of innocent girls----" He flapped a white wing in their direction, and at the same moment Lambert Sollas, with his fierce nod, struck the opening bars of "Auld Lang Syne."...Charity stared straight ahead of her and then, dropping her flowers, fell face downward at Mr.

Royall's feet.